As long as you aren't an Australian artist with a beard and a wobble board, aren't an MP from the 80s, don't present 'It's a Knockout', and don't have a big red chair and offer to 'fix it' for the kids, I think it's perfectly safe
One of the reasons I haven't played online for 18 months is because there are a lot of kids online. Personally, I wouldn't want anything to do with anyone under 16. They are annoying as hell.
The kids in my class know I have an Xbox and asked if they could add me online to play FIFA and the such. I didn't give them my gamertag because they're kids. Sure it's not breaking any rules, even with me teaching them, but morally I didn't feel it was right. Maybe it was a matter of professionality for me, I'm not sure.
I often wish there were less kids on these games. Gran Turismo online races... there is always some kid who will throw a tantrum, spin the car around and block the track while throwing obscenities down his mic because he isn't winning.
Games like WoW, you have no idea who you're playing with, its an avatar. You don't always know the ages of the people you're grouping up with and even so, generally people tend to keep good players around because it leads to a better experience.
Anyway, it isn't weird that adults and kids play online games together. It's more irritating because the two age groupings can have different expectations.
It's no different though to mixed age social, hobby and sports clubs. It's not the same as playing in the park, its a common interest / hobby group and is comparable to other persuits that fit that description, of which there are many.
For example, my mums friend; her son was in to hobbiest engineering (creating and restoring mechanical vehicles such as miniature traction engines and the likes, they had competitions and such). He was doing that since his young teens and that attracted people of broad ages, surprisingly so in fact.
It's just the nature of some hobbies and I don't quite understand why people find that so hard to understand and apply to gaming because they don't seem to apply the same concerns to other hobbies.
I often wish there were less kids on these games. Gran Turismo online races... there is always some kid who will throw a tantrum, spin the car around and block the track while throwing obscenities down his mic because he isn't winning.
Sadly acting childish when they are losing isn't isolated to kids. I have seen too many instances were adults will start been idiots because they are losing.
I need to remind people here that the question was should kids play online with adults!
1: Kid's will do what they can regradless of what we think! So one child will obey by that, but another 30 will not & we can not stop it.
2: Call of duty is filled with young kid's who will screw you over in a heartbeat but i know it's a little guy & would not curse at him & at the end of the day it is the parents who need to deal with this.
A while back I was levelling an alt on WoW. I met a guy in a dungeon and we spent about 4 hours straight doing dungeons etc. Age never really came into it, this happened over a few days and then one day we were playing again and he told me he had to go to school. Turned out he was 14.
Of course, it was really just playing and there wasn't a whole lot of socialising (past me giving him a dungeon queue boost as I qas queuing as a healer), but it did make me feel slightly odd!
I do not often play online but when I do, If it squeaks and is annoying it gets muted, I stick mainly to the subject matter of playing the game and discussing mainly that, Never been a problem with these rules.
I would really like to discuss this a lot more but it just winds me up too much, my views on it is that every adult should be allowed to talk and play video games with kids.
I would really like to discuss this a lot more but it just winds me up too much, my views on it is that every adult should be allowed to talk and play video games with kids.
It winds me up too, but you started the thread so now i'm really confused.
I've been in to gaming and been around the Internet since aged 15. I'm now aged 38. A lot has changed. Back 'in my day' (wow I sound old), we were ALL kids. We were all the same age and matured at the same rate. As gaming become more mainstream, mainly with consoles, there as been this new batch of younger people coming in over the generations. So for the first time we've got multiple generations playing in the same gaming arena.
To answer the question, based on my own experiences and what I know of from trusted people.
I think it depends on the type of game. Games that are subscription based like WoW tend to not have many kids in them. If they are there then they tend to be more of the serious kind. So there isnt much messing about.
I think the debate about the behaviour of kids in online gaming is a different question to this.
This question is more from the adult perspective.
Adults always have an in-bult advantage over a younger person because of experience. I am now much more relaxed, calmer and take everything in my stride than I was when I was a kid. Things I found intimidating as a kid, these days it doesn't effect me, mainly because my perspective as changed so I don't see things in the same way.
It comes down to the calibre of person I guess. As was pointed out in a previous question, most of the adults take on a 'teacher' role. But then isn't this by-passing the CRB checks 'real' teachers have to do before they can teach kids.
I also think there is a difference between someone who happens to bump in to kids online, amongst other adult players, and someone who is focused or whos audience makes up, a large percentage of kids. To the point that the content creator or gamer is focusing his materials towards kids.
Minecraft is an interesting area as there are a lot of kids playing it. Mostly because some schools encourage it. I must say from a personal perspective I find it kind of 'creepy' that adults want to focus their content fully to kids. Someone mentioned Stampy earlier. He seems to be ok. But one of his side kicks L for Leeee seems to have gotten himself in trouble here: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/minecraft-pervert-harassed-teenager-older-6211563 . There is also a couple of other older minecrafters that have had dubious sexual pasts, or are acting inappropriately in the community.
So though I still think it's creepy, I do think that age restriction laws need to be enforced. There are a lot of 18 year old games with kids playing them. It wouldnt take much for the platforms to ban them playing those games. They only don't do because it might be less sales for them.
How would people feel if their child (or if they had a child) was playing online with other adults? Curious if that changes people's perspective on this interesting discussion.
How would people feel if their child (or if they had a child) was playing online with other adults? Curious if that changes people's perspective on this interesting discussion.
Well it would depend on a few things, if the adult was mature and sensible then yes but if the adult was using bad language or discussing stuff that they shouldn't e.g. sexual stuff, then certainly no way. To answer your question though if the child was of secondary school age I would give the adults a chance to game sensibly and one foot out of line and they would be blocked, no second chances. What people need to understand in the UK is that not everyone is monster, everyone deserves a chance. Lets turn it around a bit, imagine this, an adult is playing Destiny and his team is one of the best and your child wants to play because he/she really needs an item at the end of a raid. The adult finds out that your child is under 16 and says to him/her, "you cannot play with us because your under 16 and your get us into trouble because in the eyes of the UK it's just wrong and creepy to game with you" How would you feel about this? Infact how would you feel if every adult that your child came across on a games console said this?
I don't know how it is on other platforms that aren't as advanced as the PS4 but on the PS4 it is highly unlikely any child could end up on the team of adults because teams are picked randomly unless you are in a group and there is no way a child would know a group of adults to specifically join them unless it is in a party and parties are more or less supposed to be for people that you actually know and can communicate back and forth with on mic.
So maybe that is possible on other consoles and platforms but on the PS4, if you are playing mutliplayer and it is not a private match, you have no choice on who is on your team and i don' think any child is going to start adding random people to their friends lists hence there would be no way they could sit and communicate with adults, unless of course it is MInecraft but in order for that to happen they would need to go on Google and find Minecraft forums or go on Facebook groups to find other people playing Minecraft and add them to their friends list in order to play on their world.
On the PS4, it can not happen by accident. Any communications with children and adults or friends lists or parties can only happen if someone from each side deliberately goes out their way to make it happen.
I don't know how it is on other platforms that aren't as advanced as the PS4 but on the PS4 it is highly unlikely any child could end up on the team of adults because teams are picked randomly unless you are in a group and there is no way a child would know a group of adults to specifically join them unless it is in a party and parties are more or less supposed to be for people that you actually know and can communicate back and forth with on mic.
So maybe that is possible on other consoles and platforms but on the PS4, if you are playing mutliplayer and it is not a private match, you have no choice on who is on your team and i don' think any child is going to start adding random people to their friends lists hence there would be no way they could sit and communicate with adults, unless of course it is MInecraft but in order for that to happen they would need to go on Google and find Minecraft forums or go on Facebook groups to find other people playing Minecraft and add them to their friends list in order to play on their world.
On the PS4, it can not happen by accident. Any communications with children and adults or friends lists or parties can only happen if someone from each side deliberately goes out their way to make it happen.
I must admit I have no clue how Destiny works when it comes to raiding and I was assuming it worked like WoW, I thought that the game just generates and finds random players. I was just using it as an example, maybe the Call of Duty Search and Destroy mode might of been better to use in my previous post. I don't play Destiny the only games I really play now on my xbox is Forza 6 and a bit of Minecraft and Call or Duty now and again but it's not very often i'm away from Forza, the game is just too good.
I suppose there's no problem as long as it is just playing. When I played World of Warcraft I regularly got approached by characters who's owners claimed to be under 13, which was the minimum age you could play. Was never sure if it was coppers, anti-paedo vigilantes, pervs or may be just may be real kids!! One 'kid' claimed to be 9 and from Sweden. Refused to believe it so he got stroppy and toddled off. As if aged 30 plus I was going to make friends with a little 'kid' who shouldn't even be playing the game!!
I don't know how it is on other platforms that aren't as advanced as the PS4 but on the PS4 it is highly unlikely any child could end up on the team of adults because teams are picked randomly unless you are in a group and there is no way a child would know a group of adults to specifically join them unless it is in a party and parties are more or less supposed to be for people that you actually know and can communicate back and forth with on mic.
So maybe that is possible on other consoles and platforms but on the PS4, if you are playing mutliplayer and it is not a private match, you have no choice on who is on your team and i don' think any child is going to start adding random people to their friends lists hence there would be no way they could sit and communicate with adults, unless of course it is MInecraft but in order for that to happen they would need to go on Google and find Minecraft forums or go on Facebook groups to find other people playing Minecraft and add them to their friends list in order to play on their world.
On the PS4, it can not happen by accident. Any communications with children and adults or friends lists or parties can only happen if someone from each side deliberately goes out their way to make it happen.
So the system cannot randomly throw adults and children into multiplayer matches/tournaments/groups together? Gran Turismo says otherwise, GTA says otherwise.
Sadly acting childish when they are losing isn't isolated to kids. I have seen too many instances were adults will start been idiots because they are losing.
True, I'm sure adults act out too... however from my experiences when its someone acting up in multiplayer its some obnoxious kid on the other end of the mic.
Lets turn it around a bit, imagine this, an adult is playing Destiny and his team is one of the best and your child wants to play because he/she really needs an item at the end of a raid. The adult finds out that your child is under 16 and says to him/her, "you cannot play with us because your under 16 and your get us into trouble because in the eyes of the UK it's just wrong and creepy to game with you" How would you feel about this? Infact how would you feel if every adult that your child came across on a games console said this?
I think a lot of parents would probably feel that their kid had been victimised by older players if they were effectively locked out of doing stuff and they would be right, it would be kind of sad. At the end of the day, people are mostly there to play a game, not to socialise. Its also not so much of a problem, most of the time you don't actually know who you're in a group with, its just an avatar. It's not until someone starts talking over their mic, and most of the times its some oik calling people "****".
The system can and will do exactly that. It will throw you into random matches with kids and adults and of course GTA does that but it is my experience, on the PS4, that when you play multiplayer games online where the computer randomly puts you in a team, no one uses their microphone. I can count on one hand the number of times I've played COD or GTA or any game really and heard someone use a microphone to talk to everyone. It doesn't happen.
Maybe on the XBox and PC it's different but not on the PS4.
On the PS4, all the action takes place in parties and of course you can join any party you want as long as the host is on your friends list but my point earlier in the thread was there is no way a child or adult could communicate with each other unless they took that route because people using their mics on multiplayer games on the PS4 just doesn't happen. It was the same with the PS3. It just never happened and if it did it would just be one person that could barely be heard with their TV on in the background. No conversations ever take place.
The system can and will do exactly that. It will throw you into random matches with kids and adults and of course GTA does that but it is my experience, on the PS4, that when you play multiplayer games online where the computer randomly puts you in a team, no one uses their microphone. I can count on one hand the number of times I've played COD or GTA or any game really and heard someone use a microphone to talk to everyone. It doesn't happen.
Maybe on the XBox and PC it's different but not on the PS4.
On the PS4, all the action takes place in parties and of course you can join any party you want as long as the host is on your friends list but my point earlier in the thread was there is no way a child or adult could communicate with each other unless they took that route because people using their mics on multiplayer games on the PS4 just doesn't happen. It was the same with the PS3. It just never happened and if it did it would just be one person that could barely be heard with their TV on in the background. No conversations ever take place.
Can I ask, do you tend to play games US or EU peak? I agree where GTA is concerned, they aren't as frequent but I've been on there with voice players frequently enough. People are always voice chatting in the pre-race lobby on Gran Turismo. Also, whether these random selections lead to friend requests depends on the game. In GT for example, if you find good players who want longer term groups then you add them as its so difficult to find a good team who are on your level and who offer a challenge.
But I think it depends on what you're playing though and also when/where people are from. North Americans use voice far more often than we do.
Yes but what is the answer............It's a tough cookie.
You've had lots of answers, they are just varied. The reason for this is because the answer itself is varied.
For players it depends on what games they play, how they play them, their own sensibilities and what their past experiences with younger players are like. For non players, it depends on their own sensibilities and how much they know about gaming. There isn't a one size fits all answer that anyone will agree on.
There isn't anything inherently sinister about adults and kids playing games though, normal people are normal and will be normal with or without games while sick people are sick people who will be sick with or without games. What its about for most people is their own gameplay experience.
My own personal answer is that on the whole my experiences with players who are kids has been largely negative. I don't have much time to play and when kids pop up in multiplayer games they usually at some point throw the game off course, which when you don't have much time to play is frustrating. That would lead me to say that it's better if adults and kids played separately.
However, many younger players may look at that statement and be really annoyed at it. This view is short sighted and possibly unfair as it only accounts for those younger players who have turned their mic on and revealed themselves to be young teens. For all I know, many of those great players I've encountered in games who contributed to a great session but didn't turn their mic on may also have been young teens themselves and those silent players who I assume are kids when they do something annoying may be 40 year old men who calculate tax returns for multinationals. But I have no way of knowing.
Other players will both agree and disagree with my sentiments. Non players, many will agree and understand my comments while many others would call me unfair and short sighted.
It's probably worth noting that children are taught at Primary School that 1) they shouldn't be on any games which they're not old enough to be on and 2) if they are talking to anybody online, they shouldn't give any information out I.e full name, age, address, etc - regardless of how old they person they're talking to is.
Now clearly not every child will take that on board and will stay play GTA or COD. They will innocently see the people online as "another player" or somebody a bit like themselves. They won't see the real world ramifications of it.
There probably isn't any harm with children playing with adults online in 95% of cases, maybe even higher, but there's always that risk of somebody abusing the situation. That will get publicity and be on the fore-front of adult's/parent's minds and discourage themselves playing with children/their children being allowed to play with adults.
Comments
This a million times over. There is nothing "wrong" with it providing the intent is harmless.
Games like WoW, you have no idea who you're playing with, its an avatar. You don't always know the ages of the people you're grouping up with and even so, generally people tend to keep good players around because it leads to a better experience.
Anyway, it isn't weird that adults and kids play online games together. It's more irritating because the two age groupings can have different expectations.
It's no different though to mixed age social, hobby and sports clubs. It's not the same as playing in the park, its a common interest / hobby group and is comparable to other persuits that fit that description, of which there are many.
For example, my mums friend; her son was in to hobbiest engineering (creating and restoring mechanical vehicles such as miniature traction engines and the likes, they had competitions and such). He was doing that since his young teens and that attracted people of broad ages, surprisingly so in fact.
It's just the nature of some hobbies and I don't quite understand why people find that so hard to understand and apply to gaming because they don't seem to apply the same concerns to other hobbies.
Sadly acting childish when they are losing isn't isolated to kids. I have seen too many instances were adults will start been idiots because they are losing.
1: Kid's will do what they can regradless of what we think! So one child will obey by that, but another 30 will not & we can not stop it.
2: Call of duty is filled with young kid's who will screw you over in a heartbeat but i know it's a little guy & would not curse at him & at the end of the day it is the parents who need to deal with this.
Also online has age restrictions which parents seem to ignore. So i say its parent abuse ignore age restrictions for kids entertainment.
Of course, it was really just playing and there wasn't a whole lot of socialising (past me giving him a dungeon queue boost as I qas queuing as a healer), but it did make me feel slightly odd!
I would really like to discuss this a lot more but it just winds me up too much, my views on it is that every adult should be allowed to talk and play video games with kids.
It winds me up too, but you started the thread so now i'm really confused.
I've been in to gaming and been around the Internet since aged 15. I'm now aged 38. A lot has changed. Back 'in my day' (wow I sound old), we were ALL kids. We were all the same age and matured at the same rate. As gaming become more mainstream, mainly with consoles, there as been this new batch of younger people coming in over the generations. So for the first time we've got multiple generations playing in the same gaming arena.
To answer the question, based on my own experiences and what I know of from trusted people.
I think it depends on the type of game. Games that are subscription based like WoW tend to not have many kids in them. If they are there then they tend to be more of the serious kind. So there isnt much messing about.
I think the debate about the behaviour of kids in online gaming is a different question to this.
This question is more from the adult perspective.
Adults always have an in-bult advantage over a younger person because of experience. I am now much more relaxed, calmer and take everything in my stride than I was when I was a kid. Things I found intimidating as a kid, these days it doesn't effect me, mainly because my perspective as changed so I don't see things in the same way.
It comes down to the calibre of person I guess. As was pointed out in a previous question, most of the adults take on a 'teacher' role. But then isn't this by-passing the CRB checks 'real' teachers have to do before they can teach kids.
I also think there is a difference between someone who happens to bump in to kids online, amongst other adult players, and someone who is focused or whos audience makes up, a large percentage of kids. To the point that the content creator or gamer is focusing his materials towards kids.
Minecraft is an interesting area as there are a lot of kids playing it. Mostly because some schools encourage it. I must say from a personal perspective I find it kind of 'creepy' that adults want to focus their content fully to kids. Someone mentioned Stampy earlier. He seems to be ok. But one of his side kicks L for Leeee seems to have gotten himself in trouble here: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/minecraft-pervert-harassed-teenager-older-6211563 . There is also a couple of other older minecrafters that have had dubious sexual pasts, or are acting inappropriately in the community.
So though I still think it's creepy, I do think that age restriction laws need to be enforced. There are a lot of 18 year old games with kids playing them. It wouldnt take much for the platforms to ban them playing those games. They only don't do because it might be less sales for them.
Well it would depend on a few things, if the adult was mature and sensible then yes but if the adult was using bad language or discussing stuff that they shouldn't e.g. sexual stuff, then certainly no way. To answer your question though if the child was of secondary school age I would give the adults a chance to game sensibly and one foot out of line and they would be blocked, no second chances. What people need to understand in the UK is that not everyone is monster, everyone deserves a chance. Lets turn it around a bit, imagine this, an adult is playing Destiny and his team is one of the best and your child wants to play because he/she really needs an item at the end of a raid. The adult finds out that your child is under 16 and says to him/her, "you cannot play with us because your under 16 and your get us into trouble because in the eyes of the UK it's just wrong and creepy to game with you" How would you feel about this? Infact how would you feel if every adult that your child came across on a games console said this?
So maybe that is possible on other consoles and platforms but on the PS4, if you are playing mutliplayer and it is not a private match, you have no choice on who is on your team and i don' think any child is going to start adding random people to their friends lists hence there would be no way they could sit and communicate with adults, unless of course it is MInecraft but in order for that to happen they would need to go on Google and find Minecraft forums or go on Facebook groups to find other people playing Minecraft and add them to their friends list in order to play on their world.
On the PS4, it can not happen by accident. Any communications with children and adults or friends lists or parties can only happen if someone from each side deliberately goes out their way to make it happen.
I must admit I have no clue how Destiny works when it comes to raiding and I was assuming it worked like WoW, I thought that the game just generates and finds random players. I was just using it as an example, maybe the Call of Duty Search and Destroy mode might of been better to use in my previous post.
So the system cannot randomly throw adults and children into multiplayer matches/tournaments/groups together? Gran Turismo says otherwise, GTA says otherwise.
True, I'm sure adults act out too... however from my experiences when its someone acting up in multiplayer its some obnoxious kid on the other end of the mic.
I think a lot of parents would probably feel that their kid had been victimised by older players if they were effectively locked out of doing stuff and they would be right, it would be kind of sad. At the end of the day, people are mostly there to play a game, not to socialise. Its also not so much of a problem, most of the time you don't actually know who you're in a group with, its just an avatar. It's not until someone starts talking over their mic, and most of the times its some oik calling people "****".
Maybe on the XBox and PC it's different but not on the PS4.
On the PS4, all the action takes place in parties and of course you can join any party you want as long as the host is on your friends list but my point earlier in the thread was there is no way a child or adult could communicate with each other unless they took that route because people using their mics on multiplayer games on the PS4 just doesn't happen. It was the same with the PS3. It just never happened and if it did it would just be one person that could barely be heard with their TV on in the background. No conversations ever take place.
Can I ask, do you tend to play games US or EU peak? I agree where GTA is concerned, they aren't as frequent but I've been on there with voice players frequently enough. People are always voice chatting in the pre-race lobby on Gran Turismo. Also, whether these random selections lead to friend requests depends on the game. In GT for example, if you find good players who want longer term groups then you add them as its so difficult to find a good team who are on your level and who offer a challenge.
But I think it depends on what you're playing though and also when/where people are from. North Americans use voice far more often than we do.
Asking multiple times isn't going to change the answer
Yes but what is the answer............It's a tough cookie.
You've had lots of answers, they are just varied. The reason for this is because the answer itself is varied.
For players it depends on what games they play, how they play them, their own sensibilities and what their past experiences with younger players are like. For non players, it depends on their own sensibilities and how much they know about gaming. There isn't a one size fits all answer that anyone will agree on.
There isn't anything inherently sinister about adults and kids playing games though, normal people are normal and will be normal with or without games while sick people are sick people who will be sick with or without games. What its about for most people is their own gameplay experience.
My own personal answer is that on the whole my experiences with players who are kids has been largely negative. I don't have much time to play and when kids pop up in multiplayer games they usually at some point throw the game off course, which when you don't have much time to play is frustrating. That would lead me to say that it's better if adults and kids played separately.
However, many younger players may look at that statement and be really annoyed at it. This view is short sighted and possibly unfair as it only accounts for those younger players who have turned their mic on and revealed themselves to be young teens. For all I know, many of those great players I've encountered in games who contributed to a great session but didn't turn their mic on may also have been young teens themselves and those silent players who I assume are kids when they do something annoying may be 40 year old men who calculate tax returns for multinationals. But I have no way of knowing.
Other players will both agree and disagree with my sentiments. Non players, many will agree and understand my comments while many others would call me unfair and short sighted.
Now clearly not every child will take that on board and will stay play GTA or COD. They will innocently see the people online as "another player" or somebody a bit like themselves. They won't see the real world ramifications of it.
There probably isn't any harm with children playing with adults online in 95% of cases, maybe even higher, but there's always that risk of somebody abusing the situation. That will get publicity and be on the fore-front of adult's/parent's minds and discourage themselves playing with children/their children being allowed to play with adults.